Friday, May 6, 2016

Gray

Everything seems gray.

Odd really, for the sun is bright. I can see it reflecting off the red bricks of the buildings outside. The leaves have returned to trees. There's baseball being played on the diamond just outside my window. Students in the band are schlepping off to the fieldhouse to rehearse "Pomp and Circumstance" for tomorrow's commencement. I shouldn't be gray.

It would make sense if it were earlier in the week. Back when it was all wind and cloud. The sky is full of sun right now. For me it's gray. Close to a shade of charcoal, really.

I was at a luncheon with students today. Somehow, my research on Dulce came up. They knew about the place! Of course they asked me if it and other accounts of strange phenomena are true. I told them the vast majority can be explained and that I'm really no fan of the ExtraTerrestrial Hypothesis. For the truly unexplained, for what is increasingly being referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), I reported I'm more interested in theories that are in-line with someone like Jacques Vallee. Here's a weird one: are UAPs products of our own minds? By focusing or dwelling on such things, can someone make these things "real"?

I related one of my favorite examples of this. It comes from the pages of John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies and I'm certain I have blogged about it before. It goes like this: A tenement building in New York City was allegedly haunted. A dark, shadowy figure in a long cloak and a hat was seen skulking about the halls. It was speculated that it might be the ghost of a Revolutionary War spy and therefore investigators set about researching historical records to see if the theory had any support. There was no evidence of any kind of spying from that period or any other. Still, investigators found one very interesting fact. One of the rooms in the building was rented to Walter Gibson.

Walter Gibson wrote The Shadow.

Every month he had to produce a new pulp about that character. That meant spending the majority of his time, sitting in a room at a typewriter, thinking and writing about The Shadow. Did Gibson expend so much mental energy on this fictional character that it became "real"? Even in a vaporous sense? Do people actually cause UAPs?

Does that mean we all have the ability to create things with our thoughts? I'm not trying to go all "Law of Attraction" on you, but might there be something to the very principle beyond all the self-help book shenanigans and downright turpitude?

I don't know.

If so, then I should be able to cast the gray away. No matter my dismal circumstances, I could recreate things. Bend and mold reality to the way I want it, maybe even regress if I ever so desire.

On FB, Colette said: "Well done, Professor. I agree....isn't there evidence that BVM sightings could be related to 'mass hysteria'? PS - I hope the grey clouds dissipate soon and your are bathed in light."

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About Me

I'm a writer, scholar, and researcher in the Chicago area. I have an M.A. in Writing from DePaul University. What do I write? Science fiction mostly. What do I research? Rhetoric and composition theory, all things Fortean...as well as other unpopular things.
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